


Blow A Kiss For You

by JohnlockAndATardis



Category: TANIS - Fandom, The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, F/M, Honestly this could have been worse, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Polyamory, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, amalia is always a demon my poor child, theres less angst than I expected of myself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 09:59:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6513586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JohnlockAndATardis/pseuds/JohnlockAndATardis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amalia doesn't know why she has so many names, or why everyone else has so few. </p><p>-</p><p>Soulmate AU where Amalia has four names on one arm and her own on the other. Inspired by that one post.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blow A Kiss For You

     They know something is wrong with her when she's born.

     She comes out a healthy, screaming baby with a head of thick black hair that with eventually pale to a rich, forest brown she will manipulate a hundred, thousand ways in her college years. She's loud and squirming and red in the face, and gives the nurses a hard run as they try to clean the fluids out of her nostrils. She doesn't sit still as they pat her clean, and her little fists strike weakly out when they try to examine her arms. They win, of course. They are bigger, older, stronger, and she is just a little baby.

     A little baby with the wrong number of names.

    They're supposed to be there when you're born, unless of course you come before the others. But nearly everyone has at least one. The names.

     She has two. They're on her left arm, impossible to make out yet but that's okay, they'll grow. They'll grow, and then her mother will make her hide them, because no one is supposed to have two names, or three, or four. Not on one arm. No one is supposed to love that much, that deeply. And no girl is supposed to love another girl.

    Her right arm is bare when she is born, a lonely, blank canvus. Her mother takes the little baby girl into her grasp, this strange child who already does not belong in a world of sensible guidelines. She loves her, she is bound to. But she is wary for her, for this little girl with so much already gone astray in her life. Gracing the baby’s cheek with her thumb, she smiles faintly, tightly. 

     “Amalia,” she whispers softly to the girl. She doesn't notice then, can't notice beneath all the swaddling, but her name appears along her wrist, scrawling itself out in a thin scroll that will one day become her own.

     No one realizes until she’s two, when the tight lines have expanded and blossomed in the manner of roses in the spring. Her mother lets her wear only long sleeves, or otherwise keeps her wrists wrapped. It doesn't work. Everyone knows about weird little Amalia Chenkova with her long list of names on one arm. Almost no one knows about her own on the other, until one day she’s shoved to the ground by the other girls at school. She remembers it well. It was a cold day, snowy. The sky was an ominous gray, and the sound of laughter had circled her like vultures to pick at her freshly opened wounds. They shove up her jacket sleeve and one of the girls, the blonde one, tilts her head to read the name aloud.

    For a moment there is silence almost as deafening as the cruel taunts that have followed her all her life. And then the japes come. She’s so awful, even she will hate herself. She goes home crying and says she never wants to go back. Her father gathers her in his lap, runs a hand through her dark curls. “God made you special, little bird,” he says as he kisses her forehead, gently holds out her wrist. She places it against his own, sees the way her mother's name stands up against sun-shined skin, in spirals and loops and elegant curls she has envied ever since she watched mama sit down to pay her bills. Her names are at four now, four little lines along her wrist, creeping and caressing the pale flesh and the veins that hide below.

    “Look, little bird,” her father says sweetly to her. “Look how much love you will have.”

    After that, she stops hiding her skin.

-

     She meets her first name at college, and looks down at her wrist to make sure that she’s right. It's a pretty faced girl with clear blue eyes like the pale and cloudless sky, endless and bright. Her laughter is musical and Amalia falls deeply into her, into the light nature of her step, as though she is always floating above the ground. Amalia knows that this isn't the last one, that there are many still to go. She knows her name doesn't belong to the girl’s flesh, but she loves her anyway, and is loved in return, if only shallowly. It's the first one who suggests the tattoos, a tradition Amalia vows never to stop. They get drunk on vodka tonics and each other, and when it's all said and done she has little blue bells where her lover’s name will always be.

     The second one burns hot and heavy, and lasts all through the summer, burning like a crime of passion. They consume each other, dragging their bodies down in kisses that last lifetimes and leave them both breathless. His skin is a stark contrast against her own, and they tumble together in the hot coals of their bed, setting each other alight. He knows just how to hold her, how to kiss her just right to drive her higher and higher. They both agree having her own name is silly, and laugh about it when they've finished fucking for the third time that night. She cries when he has to go, packs up her things the next day and leaves for America. When the burns heal she’ll have fire and ice, flames licking at her robin’s eggs.

     She finds her third in a bookstore in Portland. It's one of those cozy little places on the proverbial melting pot of streets, with broad glass windows so you can sit and watch the world go by. Work brought her there in the beginning, but now she likes to study the world as it passes, tea in hand. There's one man in particular who catches her eye. He's there every Sunday with a tall stack of books and a frazzled exterior, and she soon learns that he is an aspiring web designer going to college to learn more about computer programming. Like her, he knows the name of everyone who staffs the tiny shop. It takes him three months of passing smiles to finally come over to her. He sets down a worn schoolbag and seats himself in the chair across from her, his dark hair hanging in his face.

     “Nic,” he provides to her, by way of starting the conversation. Amalia raises her gaze and arches a brow tall and tight, setting down the mug in her hand. It's painted green, but not awful and offensive green. No, it's got just enough blue to balance it out, to make it not noxious or an eco friends advertisement. She likes it best that way.

     “Amalia,” she answers, and extends her hand. Their grips meet, and then release, her name staying hidden behind a sleeve unconsciously. He doesn't look there anyway, and she's not surprised. Most people notice the oddity of her left first, shouting out at them like a badly hidden secret. But he doesn't show any sense of distaste for the markings, the many names. Instead he leans back and pops open a book, the pages marked up by highlighter and pen and a thousand, thousand notes.

     “My roommate has three,” he says, like he's talking about Smash Mouth posters or something equally inconsequential. She can't help but smile at that, and tosses her gaze back down to her wrist, to an undecorated black line that turns as she twists. She’s going to like Nic Silver, she thinks.

-

     It’s quite the wonderful accident that she meets Alex Reagan before Nic had the chance to introduce her. They run into each other on the street near his apartment, a few months after she’s moved in with him. Alex is kind and bashful as she wipes at the mess she’s made of her shirt, a quick coffee to go from the Starbucks down the block. She offers to pay for the dry-cleaning but Amalia brushes it off in exchange for a date. When she tells Nic that night he’s kind and understanding, and they both happy it's this way. He asks her about the girl, what she’s like and if she’s pretty, but when she brings her up a week or so later the surprise on his face is for a long time her most favorite thing.

    “Nic?” Alex asks in a tone of apparent disbelief, and this leaves them all shocked. No one knows quite what to say, standing locked in a flurry of explanations that are complicated and wild, a storm of misdirection that leaves them all laughing. They split a bottle of wine and share wild stories, until a three hour board game threatens to tear them apart, and they say their goodnights. It's happy and it's blissful, it's wild and it's fun, and for a time she can forget everything but them. They become a team, a couple of three, not inseparable but sometimes it feels that way. She never wants any of it to change.

     But change must come.

-

     They end in a good way, she’s received an assignment that will take her back home, back to Russia. It's a good story to cover and she’s anxious for more, dives deep into the stories of corruption and crime until it becomes much of her whole life. The investigations are dangerous at best but she lives for the thrill. Her work takes her all over, to cover all sorts of things. Money laundering and bought votes at the election, offshore accounts and fraud of every kind. She keeps in contact with her old friends, and when Alexandra rings with a job that's quite strange, she has no power to say no.

     When she meets the demon, she has no one to blame.

-

     It is on a trip to Moscow, to a bar there. She’d cut her hair again and changed the color once more, but you can only go so far into incognito. Amalia knows she’s working with dangerous stuff, not just with the Black Tapes though those take center stage. She’s been looking into the secrets of the Kremlin’s close ring, delving into things some would say ought not to be touched. Amalia is daring and Amalia is brave, but perhaps she's done too much, gone too far with this one.

    Maybe that's why she lets the blonde buy her a drink. She knows that she shouldn't, it's a rule she’s always kept, but she’s strung out and tired, hasn't been sleeping well. The woman is lovely, she tosses her head when she laughs and places her hand on Amalia’s arm the more that they talk. They exchange topics on politics, an area she keeps light, and both of them skirt around the fact that the woman still has America left to her accent. When the last call is given, they stumble out together. She doesn't remember hitting the floor, but she remembers waking up tethered, her hands behind her back and a gag in her mouth. The blonde is still lovely but cruel now, she sees.

     When she kisses her forehead Amalia feels something strange. It sinks through her bones, through her body, seeps through her veins. A coursing quite cold, quite harsh, quite odd, until it burns her all through and leaves her hollow inside.

     Her legs, her arms, her hands, her toes, her mind, her eyes. It licks at her lips with a tongue lacking her control, whispers lullabies she’s never before known. Go to sleep, the voice tells her softly. She fights all the while, a rage against this beast. But it wins in the end as Alex calls her home, with a name that is not hers but sounds like her own. 


End file.
